Go "too high". Why dump the recruiter when you can just price yourself out of the recruiter's league?

Believe me, if your salary seems impossible to achieve the recruiter will tell you, probably pretty bluntly. And if it is possible to achieve and the recruiter helps you get there she'll be thrilled. Recruiters get a cut of that number!

(Though, remember, take recruiter advice with a grain of salt: Their tendency will probably be to talk you down. As with buyer-brokers in real estate, the recruiter's incentive is to make the deal go forward, not to hold out for the best possible price for you. Alas, in the end, the responsibility for holding out for a good price is almost impossible to delegate: The buck stops with you.)

Of course, the take-home lesson is that if you aren't comfortable setting a high anchor point for your salary you shouldn't deal through recruiters. Which probably helps to explain why companies seem to love using recruiters.

While some recruiters get a cut of the salary, others operate on a fixed contract. I know of one company that pays a recruiting firm $110-$150 per hour, and the recruiting firm only pays $50-$60 per hour.

I don’t know specifically how to manage this procedure with recruiters, because in my most recent job search I found a position without using recruiters entirely.

But my general attitude regarding salary negotiations in the early stage is this: For any job that I apply for, I can go to salary.com, fill in the appropriate information, and get a range of expected compensation levels. Any recruiter or HR flapper can do the same thing. So I tell them that I expect to be compensated according to the market rate for engineers of my skill and experience level. If they’re not satisfied with that answer, then they shouldn’t be representing my interests, because either they’re stupid or they think I’m stupid.

I've learned that, as a rule of thumb, recruiters are damage and should be avoided. They are almost always more hassle than they're worth, and the chance of any recruiter ping/interaction leading to a good, paying gig is much less than if you can deal directly with a potential client, directly with a potential hirer and decision-maker. They suffer from middle-man effects, and they look for proxy signals rather than the actual substantive things they should want. They also want a big cut. And they are almost always very technically ignorant and incapable of judging what things are important, whether a person is qualified, etc. And they can "fish you", and by that I mean they tell you they have something, but it's really just to get your resume and other facts about you, put into their database, and then nothing ever happens except maybe a series of future contact attempts about gigs that just happen to have a few buzzwords in them, but you otherwise very clearly would not be interested in or available for. Again, this is my rule of thumb based on experience with most of them. I also think their profession, at least in the software industry, is going to die out, due to all the cheaper, better, smarter alternatives to sourcing and vetting.

Sometimes we are helpful as middle-men, being the "bad" guy for the negotiations (upping the salary in negotiation based on X, Y, Z). ~20% avg fee for $80,000 vs $102,000 is a difference of $4,400 to the company, and an extra (lets say 15% commission) $660 to the recruiter. However, that is way too high of a spread at that point of the negotiation to be a feasible discussion (the candidate should have been submitted at $90-$105, or $95-$110,000).

If the company is sold on the candidate, it is feasible for the recruiter to negotiate another $10,000. If the company has other options or isn't clamoring, you may lose the offer.

But, most recruiters are bunk, and the difference between $80,000 and $95,000 can be a breakdown in the offer being pulled, ergo the "real estate" example of closing the deal at a lower price (salary) and cost of losing it all together. The cost of losing it isn't worth the extra $3,000 / company and $450 / recruiter.

With a recruiter, if you let them know your top-end range, they will typically be blunt with "that is too far out of the range of the position."

Recommended the above comment: Of course, the take-home lesson is that if you aren't comfortable setting a high anchor point for your salary you shouldn't deal through recruiters. Which probably helps to explain why companies seem to love using recruiters. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3501730

Companies can sway this the other way, with using the recruiting firm as the "bad guy" of "well, he/she was submitted at $85,000, why are they pushing back for another $5 (or $10),000. This happens as well (incorrectly "getting a candidate in, and we'll renegotiate up, you don't want to price yourself out!" or, submitting too high, resulting in an immediate dequal.

Ug.

Edit: many companies don't necessarily have a sense of fairness, hence asking for salary history, to offer you the lowest possible (or even lateral) salary.

great insight behind the scenes, thank you.

You don't really negotiate with a recruiter, in that sense. When they are asking you your salary information, it's not negotiation, it's fishing for information -- they want to know whether continuing the conversation is a waste of time or not.

Recruiters can be useful because they should know the upper salary bound for the position that they are trying to fill. Just ask them directly how high the client can go, and they'll probably volunteer this information. Act underwhelmed and ask for a little more (or end the conversation there if it's seems like a waste of time). The recruiter will go back to whatever HR manager and either get a "yes there's some flexibility" or "no it's set in stone".

Most recruiters are the "putting warm bodies in front of desks" kind. This kind of recruiter doesn't really give a crap about you or the client, they just want to make the deal, but a high salary for you works out well for them also. Filling positions this way can be a sign that the client is desperate.

There is another kind of recruiter that doesn't work this way. They're rare and they only do talent search for hard-to-fill executive and consulting positions. They are more about building networks and relationships.

What really threw up the red flag for me was that he didn't want to only know what I earned at my current position, but the 3-4 previous positions before that, including my reasons for leaving each job.

I can understand he wants to find A-type winners that are on a rising arc instead of slumming for a job, but that took a lot of balls to ask.

Wow, it sounds like they were probably just filling out the job application for you. It was clearly a "warm bodies in front of desks" kind of recruiter. I've experienced this sort of thing before where a defense contractor wins some bid and needs to hire like 2000 engineers now and just enlists a team of recruiters to make it happen.

What's he recruiting for? Banks and jobs that require security clearance often require this sort of background info.

High-frequency trading firm. I didn't think that needed bank-level clearance either, but maybe the hiring firm stayed on the cautious side of background checks.

This is completely untrue. The recruiter will be trying to push their client's rate up, while simultaneously keeping your rate as low as possible. They might say something like "our commission is x% of the final rate", but you'll typically have no way of checking that.